Unlike many general introduction books, “Mastering AngularJS Directives” by Josh Kurz takes a much more specialized approach. It assumes you know AngularJS fairly well and explores just one (but arguably the most complex) of its corners: directives.

It’s not a thick book and the table of contents looks just right: Basic introduction to directives, a simple example, and then digging deeper into integration of third party libraries, compilation, communication between directives, writing directives to watch live data for changes, and finally some optimization and code quality notes.

Unfortunately, the book is rather poorly written. It is confusing even to someone who has been using AngularJS profesionally for over 1.5 years. The explanations tend to be short and often miss the point. You may see a difficult issue brought up, followed by a listing over 2 pages long, and finally left with unsatisfactory explanation of how it works or why you would do it this way. In some ways it just lacks focus.

There are some substantive errors too – calling JS objects “JSON notation”, mentioning singletons giving you a new instance every time etc.

That said, even though it is a difficult read, it is not without value. I learned quite a few things myself, some of them mentioned directly and some between the lines. It’s one of the first attempts at thorough introduction to directives and it still may come in handy at times.